SAT: What does it test?

Chad Wemischner, a student at the private Wildwood School in West Los Angeles, writes:

As I sat in my room late on Thursday, May 21, waiting for the clock to turn to 12:01 a.m., I imagined the output of carbon dioxide in the world decreased with the number of breaths being held by high school juniors across the country. 

Our fate had been sealed weeks ago, on May 3, when we left the testing site, but the anticipation of “success” was tremendous. To my dismay, I was forced to wait until 6:45 the next morning to check my coveted SAT scores. Living in Los Angeles, I quickly realized that SAT score numbers became that day as ubiquitous and as much on everyone’s lips as their favorite Pinkberry combination or Starbucks latte.

Talk of the SAT (an acronym literally meaning nothing) in the next few days became a bona fide obsession among the high school students I was around. To us, the Golden Gates of college seem only a fantastic score away. But, should it be? 

Though four hours of my time sitting at the same desk on a Saturday morning demonstrates a fantastic amount of leg discipline and the ability to refrain from eating a proper meal during lunch hour, I have yet to figure out what else it demonstrates about me and my potential. 

During my 10th, 11th, and now at the start of my 12th grade, years, I received enough Test Prep brochures to create my own backyard forest and even more e-mails promising 200 points just for signing up. I felt like my quest toward college had become a dating service, offering a plethora of options to suit my fancy. The proposed preparation techniques, all guaranteeing a basic way to cheat the test, began to seem more important than school itself. For me, this also began to contradict the College Board’s strict policy against unfairness and cheating before, during or after taking the SAT.

Together, the emphasis on the standardized tests and all the ways to do better on them has made the college process anything but collegiate. It does not support togetherness or community. It does not celebrate, much less acknowledge, the unique strengths of a student or the areas he/she needs to work on. It does, however, bring out what I believe is the worst in people.

At my school, nine out of 10 students were unhappy with their SAT score, and I would confidently bet a higher percentage planned on taking the test again.  We all seemed to feel in the days after our SAT scores came back to us the injustice of having numerous mathematics equations and at least two reading comprehension sections about the science of bacteria or a classic poem represent who we were, and have the power to keep us out of our top-choice colleges, not help us get in.

Obsession does not begin to accurately describe the effects of this test on sophomores, juniors and seniors throughout the nation. How can you blame them? The SAT is easy to obsess over. It is the only thing everyone does.

Extracurriculars? Those vary as much as the track and field is long. Grades? Those can differ by a whole grade point if you get the easy science teacher. Recommendations? I would assume that after 59 letters, your favorite teacher might write the same thing on yours as she did on the last student's.

The other aspects of the application, meant to textually depict you as a student and teenager have been given less importance than the SAT. But by whom? A) students, B) teachers, C) college counselors, D) parents, or E) college admissions directors. Most likely a complex mix of all five, but in this case I would have to choose C), as I hear that is a good guessing strategy; most likely to be correct.

As I started to fill out my Common Application, I began to wonder how much all the other aspects of the application mattered and in what ways. During my 10-second waiting time for the extracurricular section to load onto my screen, I was reminded of three words, which in context, will stay with me for years to come.

“Everyone does it,” I was told while attending a college admissions presentation given by an Ivy League admissions representative. I, along with 19 other eager high school students, just heard community service was no longer important, as “everyone does it.” It was interesting to hear everyone did community service, as if it had become another way to check off a box on the “perfect application” checklist.  Everyone at my school does community service because it is a part of our curriculum, but why waste our time when colleges do not count that anymore? The act of doing good has been disregarded as too commonplace to be important.  What does this college process teach us to value?

I don’t think I’m the only one to feel a little disillusioned. Competition, in most settings, is healthy and a crucial part of human nature, but sacrificing certain elements of one’s high school years to make a college application look good is certainly not healthy. In the effort to be “well-rounded,” students will stop at nothing to achieve whatever might be thought of as “perfect.”  It would seem I have a better chance of scoring a 2400 than of finding a student who has not padded their application in the pursuit of so-called excellence.

If the SAT is something we can so easily manipulate by taking SAT prep classes, what is the test actually saying about me as a student and about my abilities?  Without fail, every college, brand name or not, states the “High School Transcript, Personal Essays, Teacher Recommendations, and most of all, your uniqueness” are just as -- if not more -- important than SAT scores.

This leads me to wonder how much the SAT actually affects my college fate. I will never know.

Comments

[Alice Berliner]

This is an excellent article. It's refreshing to hear about the SAT from a high school student himself. Was this in the Los Angeles times? I would love to see more from this author. well done.

[John Smith]

Finally a student's perspective of the worthless SAT has been published! Chad, whoever you are, high school students across the country applaud you!